I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of habitats, structures and other support systems for applications in space and extreme environments on Earth. I have recently written a new book titled "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax". It can be previewed and ordered at www.climateofcorruption.com. Additional information about my book and views can be found on my YouTube address: http://www.youtube.com/climateofcorruption.

It seems that along with 17 years of flat global temperatures there is some evidence that we are witnessing some cooling on global warming hype and hysteria in Washington as well. Following President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to double down on his frenetic “green” war to prevent climate change, U.S. Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) has introduced legislation to discontinue any more taxpayer green from being used to advance the U.N.’s economy-ravaging agendas. The proposed bill would prohibit future U.S. funding for the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and also for the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a scam devoted to redistributing American wealth in penance for our unfair capitalist free market prosperity.

Congressman Luetkemeyer strongly objects to the UNFCC’s use of IPCC’s suggestions and faulty data to implement a job-killing agenda here in America. He argues: “The American people should not have to foot the bill for an international organization that is fraught with waste, engaged in dubious science, and is promoting an agenda that will destroy jobs and drive up the cost of energy in the United States. Unfortunately, the president appears to be ready to fund these groups, revive harmful policies like cap and trade, and further empower out of control federal regulators at a time when we should be doing everything possible to cut wasteful spending, reduce regulatory red tape, and promote economic growth.”

While the amount we give to the UNFCC and IPCC may seem like a tiny pittance in the realm of government spending largesse, it’s important to realize that true costs of that folly amount to countless billions in disastrous policy and regulatory impacts. Under the Obama administration, the two organizations together have received a total average of $10.25 million annually, which will be upped to $13 million under a FY 13 budget request. The George W. Bush administration previously provided about $5.7 million each year.

Representative Luetkemeyer’s defunding proposal cites unsupportable IPCC claims based upon irresponsible science practices which were revealed in e-mail exchanges between climate researchers in the U.K.’s East Anglia University network. These communications provide clear evidence that leading global scientists intentionally manipulated data and suppressed legitimate opposing arguments in peer-reviewed journals. In some instances, collaborators were asked to delete and destroy incriminating e-mails rather than comply with legally-binding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

It may be instructive to remember that all of this global warming crisis frenzy really got heated up in the late 1980s, less than two decades after many scientists had warned during the mid-1970s that the next Ice Age was rapidly approaching. Even the National Academy of Sciences predicted in 1975 that there was a “finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next 100 years.”

But guess what? Climate actually does change, and the planet then experienced a warming spell. Attributing this “crisis” to influences of man-made carbon emissions, a presumption based upon theoretical climate models, the U.N. established its FCCC in 1992, began to organize conferences, and created the IPCC to conduct scientific reviews.

The central FCCC strategy to fight what was promoted as “anthropogenic” (man-made) climate change was brilliant…to put a value credit on cutbacks in the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-burning industries, and then let other industries that produced amounts of CO2 emissions in excess of their allocations, purchase credits from them. In other words, they would create a trading market to buy and sell air.

This carbon “cap-and-trade” program would be accomplished on a country-to-country international scale through the Kyoto Protocol treaty, penalizing developed countries that produce lots of CO2 emissions by forcing them to purchase credits from less developed countries (amounting to free money for them). Incidentally, China and India, which emit huge amounts of CO2, were given a pass because of their developing country status.

Although IPCC is broadly represented to the public as the top authority on climate matters, the organization doesn’t actually carry out any original climate research at all. Instead, it simply issues assessments based upon supposedly independent surveys of published research. However, some of the most influential conclusions summarized in its reports have neither been based upon truly independent research, nor properly vetted through accepted peer- review processes.

The IPCC asserted in its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 due to global warming, prompting great alarm across southern and eastern Asia, where glaciers feed major rivers. As it turned out, that prediction was traced to a speculative magazine article authored by an Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, which had absolutely no supporting science behind it. Hasnain worked for a research company headed by the IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. IPCC’s report author, Marari Lai, later admitted to the London Mail, “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take action.”

Can we count upon objective conclusions from scientists who feel “called to action”? Consider commentary by the late Stephen Schneider who served as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports. In a 1989 interview he told Discover magazine: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Oh, by the way… while “climate” is generally associated with periods spanning at least three decades, Schneider’s alarmist global warming position completely reversed a view he championed little more than a decade earlier. His 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, warned that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity.

While it should be recognized that most of the many scientific reviewers are indeed dedicated and competent people who take their work very seriously, few of them have much if any influence over final conclusions that the public hears about. Instead, the huge compilations they prepare go through international bureaucratic reviews, where political appointees dissect them, line by line, to glean the best stuff that typically supports what IPCC wanted to say in the first place. These cherry-picked items are then assembled, condensed and highlighted in the Summaries for Policymakers which are calibrated to get prime-time and front page attention.

Political summary editing processes usually progress through a series of drafts that become increasingly media-worthy. For example, the original text of an April 2000 Third Assessment Report (TAR) draft stated: “There has been a discernible human influence on global climate.” That was followed by an October version that concluded: “It is likely that increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases have contributed significantly to observed warming over the past 50 years.” Then in the final official summary, the language was toughened up even more: “Most of the observed warming over the past 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

When the U.N. Environment Programme’s spokesman, Tim Higham, was asked by New Scientist about the scientific background for this change, his answer was honest: “There was no new science, but the scientists wanted to present a clear and strong message to policymakers.”

Sometimes IPCC report statements directly contradict conclusions published by the same authors during the same time period. Regarding any “discernible human influence on global climate”, a 1996 IPCC report summary written by B.D. Santer, T.M.L Wigley, T.P. Barnett, and E. Anyamba states: “…there is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcings by greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols…from geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change…These results point towards human influence on climate.”

However, another 1996 publication, “The Holocene”, by T.P. Barnett, B.D. Santer, P.D. Jones, R.S. Bradley and K.R. Briffa, says: “Estimates of…natural variability are critical to the problem of detecting an anthropogenic [human] signal…We have estimated the spectrum…from paleo-temperature proxies and compared it with…general [climate] circulation models…none of the three estimates of the natural variability spectrum agree with each other…Until…resolved, it will be hard to say, with confidence, that an anthropogenic climate signal has or has not been detected.”

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Regarding the UN IPCC: The IPCC let the cat out of the bag within their Background Paper to UN IPCC Rev 4. (So called “RESOURCE ALLOCATION FRAMEWORK (RAF)). The real game in town is the transfer of wealth to the so called underdeveloped countries.”

The UN FCC Background Paper (1) entitled “INVESTMENT AND FINANCIAL FLOWS TO ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE” describes (as but one of many “funds”) the establishment of a funding transfer vehicle entitled: “RESOURCE ALLOCATION FRAMEWORK (RAF) China, India and the Russian Federation are likely to receive the most under the RAF formula, followed by Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, followed by a group of countries that includes Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela (GEF, 2005b).”

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to see what is going on. Just follow the money because the science no longer supports the hypothesis.

The Pachauri quote in my comment may have been a misattribution, and if so, it was unintentional and I do apologize. However this does not change my statement in the article body regarding (at least) a 17-year global temperature flattening. The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 or 19 years, and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years.

I am presently in the process of putting together an article that examines a real possibility that temperature flattening or even cooling has been going on for a substantially longer period. The posting date has yet to be determined.

The reference to Pachauri came from Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, who stated that “…the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.”

He went on to say: “Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.”

Your comments are just factually wrong. Global surface temperatures have warmed over the past 17, 18, 19, 23 years – whatever timeframe you want to cherrypick. Not being statistically significant at a 95% confidence level is not the same as no warming. That’s like saying 1 ± 2 = 0. It’s mathematically illiterate. You can check the surface warming trends for yourself here: http://skepticalscience.com/trend.php

Even more importantly, global surface warming is only a tiny fraction of overall global warming, which continues unabated. http://skepticalscience.com/nuccitelli-et-al-2012.html

I would wonder why people with zero scientific expertise bother to write about subjects for which they don’t even grasp the most basic fundamentals, except that your underlying motivation and bias is entirely transparent. History will not view the people at Heartland kindly.

According to CRU, the decade of 2001-2010 is the warmest year on record, with a mean temperature 0.2 degrees centigrade higher than the decade of 1991 – 2000.

Now, it’s true that CRU has 1998 as the warmest year on record, but their records aren’t as comprehensive as the NASA GISS records, which show 2005 and 2010 as tied for the warmest year. But even with that, CRU shows that the next nine warmest years are all in the decade 2001-2010.

What’s more, Dr. Phil Jones of CRU has stated that there is a warming trend since 1995 at above a 95% statistical confidence level.

The CRU data, like NASA GISS and like BEST, all show a statistically significant warming trend. So, for that matter, do the paleoclimate proxies.

Larry, What you should be concerned about is why, during that same 17 year period, global temps haven’t fallen anything similar to past temp rise over the past 40 years.

If this were all somehow a cyclical thing, then you’d expect to see down trends similar to past up trends. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re seeing rapid up trends followed by somewhat less up trends.

Why the hell are you publishing papers on climate when you have absolutely ZERO educational background in climate science? What is your motivation? Well, that’s an easy question to answer, and your bias is equally transparent.

It’s embarrassing when old information from Skeptical Science is used to make a case that warming hasn’t paused as Andrew Glickson has just found out. I missed my chance to correct Glickson but others made it into the comments before they were suddenly closed and ended that Conversation.

The mechanics of Larry’s PR passthrough are less interesting than his complete disconnect from climatology.

Before he became the private sectror go-to guy if you want your corporate logo on the side of a Russian booster, his closest approach to rocket science at NASA was overseeing the astronauts’ spacesuit wardrobe.

Everyone at this blog is well read on climate science making them at least an analyst. Poking at anyone for not being a contributor when analyst is sufficient is probably libelous. Of course it is a blog. Normal rules of courtesy are strongly urged. Or no poking at people for not being contributors. This kind of arrogance got humanity over 100 years of spontaneous life generation thinking during the 18th and 19th centuries until people started looking at decaying organic matter under microscopes and presto: micro to macro life very quickly.

No more spontaneous life generation. At the other end of the scale, the internal planet does practically all of the warming of the planet (sunlight within historical ranges assumed); not humanity, not carbon gases. Go look it up, check it out, what ever you need to do to pick up on this fundamental reality. Stop the distractions and entertainment where only reality matters in this instance.